With my Obsidian and desk tour for 2026 done it’s time to turn attention to my productivity system. Today we’ll walk through how I keep track of tasks and all the other tools that help keep me productive.

Emacs

Doom Emacs, and orgmode specifically has been my task management system for most of 2025. It takes all the stuff I loved about nvim orgmode and just works. The nvim orgmode system mostly worked but also sometimes the headings or .org file formatting would break for no reason I could figure out. Instead of continuing to fight it, I decided to go back to the source and just start using Emacs.

I use a few .org files to section off parts of my life.

• personal.org (for personal tasks outside of my job)
• proudcity.org (the job tasks)
• pn.org (the board for my daughter’s dance)
• books.org (so I don’t order books a second time)
• later.org (I’ll come to that)
• inbox.org (my inbox)

My least used file is inbox.org. I really only use it when I’m on my phone using beorg. I’ll add stuff to inbox.org and then at some later point deal with it. I don’t worry about clearing out my inbox.org daily, or even weekly. Nothing is urgent, it’s some note from when I was killing time and saw a cool Emacs or Hyprland tool on Reddit. I can deal with that today, or next week, or next month.

I spend most of my time in the proudcity.org file which contains all the important things I need to track for work. Many of those tasks correspond with a GitHub Issue and thus are linked to GitHub so I can easily jump to the issue I need to deal with. I track issues personally because GitHub doesn’t do a good job with dates and reminding me that something is coming, where Agenda view in orgmode does.

I have one set of custom views that correspond to my work tasks. If I’ve tagged something as :active: or :meeting: I want to be able to get a view that shows me these tasks so I can make sure I cover them during our weekly meetings.

personal.org handles all the random things I need to track around the house. From pricing house projects to reminding me to do some bike maintenance every few weeks, if it’s a home task it goes in the personal.org file.

I like books, and more than once I’ve ordered a book only to order it a second time or I borrow a book from the library only to return it and then have a copy come in I ordered for purchase. I’m trying to stop this by tracking my books in books.org. I have headings for my Library, my local book store (Books and Co), for the used bookstore where I have long-term books on my list that may come in (The Bookman) and a list for books I want to purchase but haven’t yet.

One final component of my orgmode setup has been org-pomodoro which adds a Pomodoro timer to orgmode. After struggling with focus, using this for just a few weeks helped me retrain my brain to focus and not trundle off to random interesting stuff on the internet.

Read Later

While I mostly think that read later is a waste of time I do still come across links during the week that I want to write about at some point in the future, maybe for my newsletter or for some other project. Instead of storing any link I might maybe read in a read later service the link can go in my later.org file. If I don’t read it by Friday I’ll either log it with a project or delete the link.

No I don’t archive it, just delete it and forget about it. There will always be something interesting to read coming across my feed and I need to read what I can while letting the other stuff go without worry.

I know that if it’s not interesting this week when I have some time to read, it won’t be interesting next week. I’m going to stop fooling myself and just let the content go.

I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to open each link I have on Friday in my default browser (Zen) and then delete the link from later.org. Next I either read the article, or close the tab and don’t worry about it anymore.

Notebooks

While much of my productivity system is based on digital tools, I still use a notebook. I generally have a notebook in front of me at my desk where I’ll write down the 2 – 3 tasks I should focus on for the day, along with their GitHub Issue number. We create branches based on the issue number so having a quick reference I can look down at is very helpful.

I also carry a pocket notebook. Sure I have beorg and that’s synced via Mobius and Syncthing back to my laptop but that system creates just enough issue with sync conflicts that I don’t bother using it. I also try to keep my phone as far away from me as possible for as much of the day as possible. A pocket notebook allows me to write reminders to myself while I’m out without needing to touch my phone and possibly get dragged into a side quest I shouldn’t be anywhere near.

The final notebook I use regularly is my reading notebook. I have a post coming on the importance of physical experiences in a digital world where I’ll go deeper into my notebook. As a summary, if a note feels like to much work to write down then I’m telling myself it’s not as important as I thought it was. When I go to write a summary of something I’m forced to ensure I really understand it instead of highlighting something without forcing my brain to understand the context. Transferring a note from my notebook to Obsidian also forces me to expand and do more filtering of the content.

Hyprland

If I step back and look at the biggest revelation for 2025 in my productivity it was definitely Hyprland as a desktop environment. I had tried various tiling window managers a few times on Linux, and used many window management apps on macOS to try and get the style of system I now have with Hyprland.

Note: I use dvorak so chtn corresponds to keys like wasd would for gaming. I generally hold super with my left hand and control direction with my right hand.

With the Super key as a base I can hold CTRL and then use chtn on my right hand to increase or decrease the size of a window. Super plus ALT and chtn swaps windows in a direction, even moving them across screens to swap. Super plus SHIFT moves windows between my monitors without swapping the window currently on a screen.

I use workspaces with Super and 1 – 5 being my main Dell monitor (see my desk setup video) and Super with 6 – 0 being the laptop screen workspaces. I generally pin different applications to different workspaces, but can use a combination like Super Shift 1 to move the currently focused window to workspace 1, which would be on my Dell screen. I keep any local audio player on Super 7 so I can swap to that workspace and then control my music.

Yes Hyprland took a few weeks to get used to, but I was able to use it fairly easily in the first few days and it only took a few weeks to finally get my keyboard mappings where they feel like second nature and I don’t have to think about what I’m doing when I navigate my software.